I feel like I passed an important marking of adulthood today. I read some SF and felt like the story lost something when it went from being about the adventures of the characters to being about a Big Idea lurking in the background of the setting.
(Alistair Reynolds, Revenger/Shadow Captain/Bone Silence, overall some entertainingly goofy space pirate action until the last half of the final book drags the leads abruptly through a revolution and an encounter with an Unfathomably Old Piece Of Super Technology related to the Big Idea.)
@anthracite I lost patience with stories about “ancient supercomputers “ a while ago. All evidence points to computer tech always getting better.
This particular story didn't involve any computers at all. It's set something like fourteen complete civilization collapses in the future.
It's unfathomable super-technology but it *doesn't* have a computer in it? You must be reading 20th-century pulp. 😁
@xinjinmeng @anthracite That's how you can tell it's alien, it doesn't have a computer in it.
